Psychiatrists and Gitmo

Today's New York Times published this statement in an article about the role of psychiatrists in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, "... authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said their interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo showed that the program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means to obtaining intelligence."

Don't worry though. They weren't acting as physicians at the time. "Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, declined to address the specifics in the accounts. But he suggested that the doctors advising interrogators were not covered by ethics strictures because they were not treating patients but rather were acting as behavioral scientists."

Remind me to stay the hell away from behavioral scientists.

I don't know why they need psychiatrists to help with the interrogations. It seems like any group of cruel adolescents could design the sessions which are described as, "including sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, painful body positions, feigned suffocation, and beatings. " Not to mention peeing on Korans and sexual provocation.

"'Their [the psychiatrists] purpose was to help us break them,' one former interrogator told The Times earlier this year."

It is not good for psychiatrists to break their oath to "do no harm" because the government asks them to. I am reminded of the psychiatrists of the former Soviet Union whose real purpose was to assess the patient's political beliefs, often sending the recalcitrant to the psych hospital/gulag. What else will psychiatrists do to people if the government justifies it?

Picture this scene described by The Times, "The former interrogator said the ... doctors usually observed interrogations from behind a one-way mirror, but sometimes were also in the room with the detainee and interrogator."

In an ideal world abusers would be afraid that a physician or psychaitrist, bastions of ethical behavior, would see their crime and report them. Here in reality they are accomplicies hiding behind mirrors.

UPDATE: US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo and Iraq, Afghanistan: UN source

Were psychiatrists involved in outright torture, I wonder? Paging Dr. Mengele ...